Many hands make for light work

By the Session Leader:

“What a grand day!” as one of our volunteers exclaimed as she arrived.  

Overnight temperatures at the nearest weather station had dipped to -4.6 C.  So first thing the sweet spring flowers had frost on them:

Frost soon melted in the warm sunshine.  Green-Gymmers warmed up too. 

There were many of us this morning: 15 volunteers altogether.  [Plus 2 supernumeraries – Ed.]  Hence a crowded car park: 

We had worked on the site in the autumn, and not much had grown over the winter.  The leader was therefore worried that we were not going to have enough work.  He need not have been concerned: we were given a good list of five main jobs.

The first was right behind the cars.  Wheel-barrowing (some of) the pile of logs …

over to the wood store.  

Not so easy as two of the barrows had faulty tyres!  But by the end of the session the workforce had moved those logs which were ready for burning, restacked the oversize ones, and left the area neat and tidy:

The second job was very familiar: filling in potholes along a driveway.  This looked as if this was a task which had been done before in previous years:

With all their training and experience from last time we did this at Green Gym, there were Green-Gymmers eager to volunteer for that:

It had to be a team of 4: two to shovel (we had only 2 spades); one person “wheelbarrow competent and confident”; and one supervisor to hold the imaginary clipboard. 

They started at the far end of the driveway …

and worked their way inwards, with much mock-serious discussion about “grading” of potholes, “belts” of potholes, whether the team should be engaged in “pothole prevention work” by addressing smaller depressions which had the potential to become potholes in the future, and working methods:

“You need to work in unison.”

– “We are in Unison!”

– “And we could tender for projects left by Carillion.”

When they had done, you could certainly see where they had been.  They had left the drive easier to motor along, but looking like it had sticking plasters:

 

Meanwhile the third task was being tackled in hiding:

This team was cutting down part of a tree that had collapsed with the weight of ivy and wind-pressure.

A fourth team was tackling a bigger horizontal tree that had also collapsed.  But the leader failed to take a photo.  Or were those volunteers trying to stay incognito?

The fifth team had found a gap in the dead hedge at the far end of the site which required some hefty stakes to be brought over from the sawing teams:

The porter happens to be Scottish, but this is not the Highland Fling.

The stakes had to be sharpened …

then hammered into place.

In the middle of all the work we had to stop for tea-break which was in an idyllic spot …

under the shade of the London plane tree which we have admired on previous occasions:

The goodies included home-made Jaffa cakes and frangipane:

The general verdict was that they were “better than the ones you can buy in shops.”

As the tasks were finishing we were left to drag as much dead, and live, wood as we could to build up the dead hedge by the road:

Two characters turned up along the way, and wanted to join: 

Spiderman I recognize.  Who’s the other dude?

PS from the Editor:

One of our readers may be able to help with identification of our supernumeraries?  Spiderman was my fave comic-book hero when I was a kid; subject of endless spin-offs since.  I have yet to see a Green-Gymmer superhero or lego character.

How to get to a place of bliss (legally and safely)

By ‘C’:

Access to places where the general public is not admitted, is one of the occasional treats of Green Gym.  Today we were in Paradise. 

Yes, really: Paradise Wood – the largest collection of timber trials in Britain.  All the extraordinary compartments we walked past to the one where we were to work, are scientific experiments in progress.  This one in particular, we thought, was quite magical in appearance:

Paradise Wood is so large, it would be quite easy to get lost among the trees.  That didn’t happen, but we did have two lost souls outside the gate.  They had arrived just that fraction too late at the RV point, and had been unable to attract the attention of the rest of us by calling out.  Eventually, they managed to make contact by that wonderful modern invention, the mobile phone; and ‘St Peter’ walked over with a key to admit them.

Meanwhile, the working party had been guided to the right ‘heaven’: a comparative study of companion trees for walnut.  The secondary planting here was hazel.  The ideas is that companion trees could supply shelter for the timber trees while they are small, encourage the timber trees to grow tall and straight, and discourage “epicormic growth”.  (That’s low, side branches – the point being that knots reduce the value of timber.)

Hazel itself is also a crop.  So we were detailed to progress the task of harvesting: coppicing and processing hazel rods. 

One team worked on processing what had been cut by a previous work-group.  Thin rods were cleaned up, and sent for binders (min. 8’), while sturdy rods were fashioned into stakes (6’):

In the course of this, we found once again that the billhook is a wonderfully versatile tool.  Also that a trestle can be improvised from almost anything – here the pile of stout logs for firewood:

There were almost no left-overs, for the remaining brash would be useful in due course.  The last action, by the final working-party in this compartment this season, will be to pile brash over the freshly coppiced stools.  The entire wood is secured all-round with deer- (and people-)proof fencing; but still the deer manage to get in, and relish nothing better than fresh shoots for breakfast.  The volunteers at the locked gate would not have had to have been kept waiting for the porter (“Oh dear!”) if they had been Bambi and the Great Prince.

Meanwhile, the second, larger party was engaged on cutting down more hazel.  This could, on occasion, be a two-person job, especially to extract some of the larger pieces:

The coppicing was a tad haphazard to begin with.  By tea-break, however, the usual Green-Gym desire for order had prevailed.  Cuttings were soon being sorted into piles of different materials:

There was even some preliminary processing taking place:

By session end, there was still plenty to do.  But there are plenty of other working-groups scheduled for this task.  Having left the site in a tidy, orderly state (and retrieved all the different tools: billhooks, bowsaws, pruning saws, and loppers) we could return to the world beyond the gate with a clear conscience.